Hey!

Chris here. Welcome to Blueprint—the newsletter to help you build a winning engineering team.

Too many people live by rules they didn't design. You can see it everywhere once you stop to look:

• The founder who won't touch anything work-related on a Saturday.

• The engineer who swears they can't get into deep work unless every condition is perfect.

• The leader who inherited a calendar packed with standing meetings and treats it like the weather—just something that happens to them.

None of these are immutable laws. They're just defaults.

Yet most people never stop to question the difference.

Let me show you what I mean. 👇️ 

📒 DEEP DIVE

The Unwritten Rules Running Your Life

How inherited defaults quietly cap your capacity—and what you can do to break free.

The Weekend Rule

A lot of people carry a belief about weekends that goes something like: working on Saturday or Sunday means something is wrong with you. You're unbalanced, have lost the plot, or both.

I used to hear that and nod along. But as I got older, I found reality to be quite different.

For years, I've woken up at 5 and knocked out 2.5 hours of work before 7:30. Every day, Saturday and Sunday included.

And what I've found is that starting family time having already accomplished something makes the whole day feel better. I can go to my kid's football game in the afternoon feeling present and stress-free, knowing I've already moved my own work ball down the field.

While the rule said that working on weekends would make my life worse, my lived experience is the opposite.

And where some of these norms protect you, many of them just box you in.

The only way to know which is which is to stop treating them all as gospel.

How Norms Become Ceilings

Once you accept something as "just how life is," you stop looking for alternatives.

Founders do this all the time. They either go all-in on always-on culture because that's what they believe building a company is supposed to look like, or they swing hard the other way and create rigid separations that don't actually fit the reality of what they're building.

Both are inherited scripts. Neither should be accepted at face value.

Because the limits you believe become the limits you have. And no, that's not motivational poster language. If you've decided a wall is real, you stop looking for the door.

Capacity Is Conditioning

Think about it like running a marathon: Nobody laces up their shoes for the first time and runs 26.2 miles. You build to it. And while the early miles feel brutal, they start to feel normal over time. Then, eventually, not running feels off.

Go read Kobe Bryant's biography. He talks about doing this for so long that no one could ever catch up. He built a capacity most people wrote off as genetic, and then watched everyone else operate inside the limits they assumed were fixed.

Your ability to sustain focus, hold a longer work window, or find output in a non-traditional hour works the same way.

The people who seem to have endless bandwidth didn't start there. They've been doing it long enough that the absence of it creates discomfort—which is exactly where I am now. When something keeps me from my morning block, I feel it for the rest of the day.

The ceiling you're bumping up against is, in most cases, something you built or inherited.

So why not create something that serves you better?

Rest Isn't the Enemy

I want to be very clear about something, because this can easily slide into territory I don't mean it to.

There are nights when my brain is complete mush after 8,000 meetings or being in execution mode all day.

When that happens, I sit down and watch a show, and I don't think twice about it. Because the rest makes me more productive over time, and I know that.

The distinction I'm drawing isn't between rest and work, but between intentional rest and rest by default.

Watching something because you chose to decompress is different from ending up 3 hours deep in a doom scroll session because that's just what happened when you sat on the couch.

The goal here is to find intentional rules—ones you chose based on how you function—rather than ones you inherited without a second thought.

BEFORE YOU GO…

There's a lot of junk floating around that people take at face value.

Work-life balance dogma and hustle culture dogma are 2 sides of the same coin. Both get in the way of you actually figuring out what actually works for you specifically.

Remember, "normal" is subjective. Don't let others make that decision for you.

Talk soon,

Chris.